The present disclosure relates generally to mainframe computing, and more particularly to methods, systems and computer program products of generating ease of use interfaces for legacy system management facilities (SMF).
International Business Machines Corporation's (IBM's) system management facilities (SMF) is a component of IBM's z/OS operating system for mainframe computers, providing a standardized method for writing out records of activity to a file (or data set to use a z/OS term). SMF provides infrastructure that allows for operating system components and applications to allow for full “instrumentation” of all baseline activities running on that IBM mainframe operating system, including input/output (I/O), network activity, software usage, error conditions, processor utilization, instrumentation, security, and performance, etc. This data provides insight to all manner of operating system events and can contain extremely valuable information. Currently there are at least 110 IBM owned SMF record types, some with many subtypes, and 128 records that are available to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). A few exemplary record types may include: IBM Resource Measurement Facility (RMF), Resource Access Control Facility (RACF), Database 2 (DB2), Customer Information Control System (CICS), WebSphere message queue (MQ), and WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, etc.
SMF record exists in terse raw binary format. On one hand, it is very compact, economical and efficient. On the other hand, the definitions for each of these record types are different, complicated, and difficult to understand. It is desirable to provide access to SMF record through various modern computer languages for novice mainframe software engineers as well data scientists interested in examining the SMF record contents.
Therefore, heretofore unaddressed needs still exist in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.